Foreground subtraction is the biggest challenge for future redshifted 21 cm observations to probe reionization. We use a short GMRT observation at 153 MHz to characterize the statistical properties of the background radiation across ~ one degree to sub-arcminutes angular scales, and across a frequency band of 5 MHz with 62.5 kHz resolution. The statistic we use is the visibility correlation function, or equivalently the angular power spectrum C_l. We present the results obtained from using relatively unsophisticated, conventional data calibration procedures. We find that even fairly simple minded calibration allows one to estimate the visibility correlation function at a given frequency V_2(U,0). From our observations we find that V_2(U,0) is consistent with foreground model predictions at all angular scales except the largest ones probed by our observations where the the model predictions are somewhat in excess. On the other hand the visibility correlation between different frequencies kappa(U, Delta nu), seems to be much more sensitive to calibration errors. We find a rapid decline in kappa(U, Delta nu), in contrast with the prediction of less than 1 % variation across 2.5 MHz. In this case however, it seems likely that a substantial part of the discrepancy may be due to limitations of data reduction procedures.
We present an overview for the reionization search at GMRT. The forecast sensitivities are promising for an early detection. RFI mitigation has been successful. Several hundred hours of telescope time have already been invested in this ongoing effort, and analysis of the data is in progress.
Preliminary results are presented from a simple, single-antenna experiment designed to measure the all-sky radio spectrum between 100 and 200 MHz. The system used an internal comparison-switching scheme to reduce non-smooth instrumental contaminants in the measured spectrum to 75 mK. From the observations, we place an initial upper limit of 450 mK on the relative brightness temperature of the redshifted 21 cm contribution to the spectrum due to neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM) during the epoch of reionization, assuming a rapid transition to a fully ionized IGM at a redshift o…
We use cosmological simulations of reionization to predict the possible signal from the redshifted 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen in the pre-reionization era and to investigate the observability of this signal. We show that the separation of the mean (global) signal over the whole sky from the known foreground contamination may be feasible, but very challenging. In agreement with previous studies, we demonstrate that measuring angular fluctuations in the HI signal is likely to be extremely difficult if not impossible because of the overwhelming contamination from the galactic and extragalactic…
We use cosmological simulations of reionization to predict the effect of large HII regions around individual high-redshift quasars on the possible signal from the redshifted 21cm line of neutral hydrogen in the pre-reionization era. We show that these HII regions appear as ``spectral dips'' in frequency space with equivalent widths in excess of 3 mK MHz or depths in excess of about 1.5 mK, and that they are by far the most prominent cosmological signals in the redshifted HI distribution. These spectral dips are expected to be present in almost every line of sight. If the spectral dips of a lar…
Before reionization, the intergalactic medium (IGM) may have been sufficiently cold for low-mass "minihalos" to condense out of the gas and subsequently affect reionization. Previous work has shown that minihalos generate reasonably large 21 cm fluctuations. Here we consider this signal in its proper cosmological context and show that isolating minihalos from the rest of the IGM is extremely difficult. Using the well-known halo model, we compute the power spectrum of 21 cm fluctuations from minihalos and show that the signal decreases rapidly as feedback increases the Jeans mass. We then show …
Light travel time delays distort the apparent shapes of HII regions surrounding bright quasars during early stages of cosmic reionization. Individual HII regions may remain undetectable in forthcoming redshifted 21 cm experiments. However, the systematic deformation along the line of sight may be detectable statistically, either by stacking tomographic 21cm images of quasars identified, for example, by JWST, or as small-scale anisotropy in the three-dimensional 21cm power spectrum. Here we consider the detectability of this effect. The anisotropy is largest when HII regions are large and expan…
Large fluctuations in the electron column density can occur during the reionization process. We investigate the possibility of deriving the electron density fluctuations through detailed mapping of the redshifted 21-cm emission from the neutral medium during reionization. We find that the electron-scattering optical depth and 21-cm differential brightness temperature are strongly anti-correlated, allowing optical depth estimates based entirely on redshifted 21-cm measurements. This should help isolate the CMB polarization fluctuations that are due to reionization, allowing both cleaning of the…
We investigate the possibility of probing the large scale structure in the universe at large redshifts by studying fluctuations in the redshifted 1420 MHz emission from the neutral hydrogen (HI) at early epochs. The neutral hydrogen content of the universe is known from absorption studies for z<4.5. The HI distribution is expected to be inhomogeneous in the gravitational instability picture and this inhomogeneity leads to anisotropy in the redshifted HI emission. The best hope of detecting this anisotropy is by using a large low-frequency interferometric instrument like the Giant Meter-Wave Ra…
For the GMRT, we calculate the expected signal from redshifted HI emission at two frequency bands centered at 610 and 325 MHz. The study focuses on the visibility-visibility cross-correlations, proposed earlier as the optimal statistical estimator for detecting and analyzing this signal. These correlations directly probe the power spectrum of density fluctuations at the redshift where the radiation originated, and thereby provide a method for studying the large scale structures at large redshifts. We present detailed estimates of the correlations expected between the visibilities measured at d…
We simulate the distribution of neutral hydrogen (HI) at the redshifts z=1.3 and 3.4 using a cosmological N-body simulation along with a prescription for assigning HI masses to the particles. The HI is distributed in clouds whose properties are consistent with those of the damped Lyman-αabsorption systems (DLAs) seen in quasar spectra. The clustering properties of these clouds are identical to those of the dark matter. We use this to simulate the redshifted HI emission expected at 610 MHz and 325 MHz, two of the observing bands a the GMRT. These are used to predict the correlations expected be…
We show how the morphological analysis of the maps of the secondary CMB anisotropies can detect an extended period of ``smoldering'' reionization, during which the universe remains partially ionized. Neither radio observations of the redshifted 21cm line nor IR observations of the redshifted Lyman-alpha forest will be able to detect such a period. The most sensitive to this kind of non-gaussianity parameters are the number of regions in the excursion set, the perimeter of the excursion set, and the genus of the largest (by area) region. For example, if the universe reionized fully at z=6, but …
Constraints on cosmological parameters from upcoming measurements with the Mileura Widefield Array-Low Frequency Demonstrator (MWA-LFD) of the redshifted 21 cm power spectrum are forecast assuming a flat LCDM cosmology and that the reionization of neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium occurs below a redshift of z=8. We find that observations with the MWA-LFD cannot constrain the underlying cosmology in this scenario. In principle, a similar experiment with a 10-fold increase in collecting area could provide useful constraints on the slope of the inflationary power spectrum, n_s, and the…
The introduction of low-frequency radio arrays is expected to revolutionize the study of the reionization epoch. Observation of the contrast in redshifted 21cm emission between a large HII region and the surrounding neutral inter-galactic medium (IGM) will be the simplest and most easily interpreted signature. However the highest redshift quasars known are thought to reside in an ionized IGM. Using a semi-analytic model we describe the redshifted 21cm signal from the IGM surrounding quasars discovered using the i-drop out technique (i.e. quasars at z~6). We argue that while quasars at z<6.5 se…
Reionization is thought to be dominated by low mass galaxies, while direct observations of resolved galaxies probe only the most massive, rarest objects. The cross-correlation between fluctuations in the surface brightness of the cumulative Ly-alpha emission (which serves as a proxy for the star formation rate) and the redshifted 21cm signal from neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM), will directly probe the causal link between the production of ionizing photons in galaxies and the reionization of the IGM. We discuss the prospects for detecting this cross-correlation for unresolve…
The GMRT reionization effort aims to map out the large scale structure of the Universe during the epoch of reionization (EoR). Removal of polarized Galactic emission is a difficult part of any 21 cm EoR program, and we present new upper limits to diffuse polarized foregrounds at 150 MHz. We find no high significance evidence of polarized emission in our observed field at mid galactic latitude (J2000 08h26m+26). We find an upper limit on the 2-dimensional angular power spectrum of diffuse polarized foregrounds of [l^2 C_l/(2 PI)]^{1/2}< 3K in frequency bins of width 1 MHz at 300<l<1000. The 3-d…
The reionization of the Universe, it is believed, occurred by the growth of ionized regions (bubbles) in the neutral intergalactic medium (IGM). We study the possibility of detecting these bubbles in radio-interferometric observations of redshifted neutral hydrogen (HI) 21 cm radiation. The signal 1 mJy will be buried in noise and foregrounds, the latter being at least a few orders of magnitude stronger than the signal. We develop a visibility based formalism that uses a filter to optimally combine the entire signal from a bubble while minimizing the noise and foreground contributions. This fo…
We examine the possibility of constraining the cosmological mean mass and dark energy densities by an application of the Alcock-Paczynski test on redshifted 21-cm maps of the epoch of reionization. The 21-cm data will be provided as a function of frequency and angular positions on the sky. The ratio of the frequency to angular distance scales can be determined by inspecting the anisotropy pattern of the correlation function of brightness temperature. We assess the sensitivity of the distance ratio to the cosmological parameters and present a technique for disentangling geometrical distortions …
The clustering pattern in high redshift HI maps is expected to be anisotropic due to two distinct reasons, the Alcock-Paczynski effect and the peculiar velocities, both of which are sensitive to the cosmological parameters. The signal is also expected to be sensitive to the details of the HI distribution at the epoch when the radiation originated. We use simple models for the HI distribution at the epoch of reionizaation and the post-reionization era to investigate exactly what we hope to learn from future observations of the anisotropy pattern in HI maps. We find that such observations will p…
We present Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) observations of redshifted HI 21cm absorption in two low redshift (z=0.2212, z=0.0912) damped Lyman-alpha systems seen towards the gigahertz peaked source OI 363 (z_em = 0.630). The object at z=0.0912 is the lowest redshift damped Lyman-alpha system known to date. Ground based imaging (Rao & Turnshek, 1998) shows that at neither redshift is there a large spiral galaxy at low impact parameter to the line of sight to OI 363, in contradiction with the suggestion that these systems are large proto-disks. Since OI 363 is a highly compact, core domin…
The redshifted 21-cm line of distant neutral H atoms provides a probe of the cosmic ``dark ages'' and the epoch of reionization (``EOR'') which ended them. The radio continuum produced by this redshifted line can be seen in absorption or emission against the CMB at meterwaves, yielding information about the thermal and ionization history of the universe and the primordial density perturbation spectrum that led to galaxy and large-scale structure formation. Observing this 21-cm background is a great challenge. A new generation of low-frequency radio arrays is currently under development to sear…
The introduction of low-frequency radio arrays over the coming decade is expected to revolutionize the study of the reionization epoch. Observation of the contrast in redshifted 21cm emission between a large HII region and the surrounding neutral IGM will be the simplest and most easily interpreted signature. We find that an instrument like the planned Mileura Widefield Array Low-Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) will be able to obtain good signal to noise on HII regions around the most luminous quasars, and determine some gross geometric properties, e.g. whether the HII region is spherical or coni…
The process of reionization is now believed to have proceeded in an orchestrated manner beginning with UV photons emitted by high redshift galaxies containing a large fraction of Population III stars carving out ionised regions around them. The physics during this era can be studied with a combination of redshifted 21-cm spin-flip transition tracing neutral hydrogen gas, IR emission from massive primordial stars that trace the global star-formation rate during reionization, and the imprint of hot-electrons in first supernovae remnants Compton-cooling off of cosmic microwave background (CMB) ra…
A number of large current experiments aim to detect the signatures of the Cosmic Reionization at redshifts z>6. Their success depends crucially on understanding the character of the reionization process and its observable consequences and designing the best strategies to use. We use large-scale simulations of cosmic reionization to evaluate the reionization signatures at redshifted 21-cm and small-scale CMB anisotropies in the best current model for the background universe, with fundamental cosmological parameters given by WMAP 3-year results (WMAP3). We find that the optimal frequency range f…
We study the prospects for extracting detailed statistical properties of the neutral Hydrogen distribution during the era of reionization using the brightness temperature fluctuations from redshifted 21 cm line emission. Detection of this signal is complicated by contamination from foreground sources such as diffuse Galactic synchrotron and free-free emission at low radio frequencies, extragalactic free-free emission from ionized regions and radio point sources. We model these foregrounds to determine the extent to which 21 cm fluctuations can be detected with upcoming experiments. We find tha…
We assess the impact of inhomogeneous reionization on detection of HII regions surrounding luminous high redshift quasars using planned low frequency radio telescopes. Our approach is to implement a semi-numerical scheme to calculate the 3-dimensional structure of ionized regions surrounding a massive halo at high redshift, including the ionizing influence of a luminous quasar. As part of our analysis we briefly contrast our scheme with published semi-numerical models. We calculate mock 21cm spectra along the line of sight towards high redshift quasars, and estimate the ability of the planned …
The HI distribution at the epoch of reionization (EOR) is largely determined by the sizes and distribution of the ionized regions. In the scenario where the ionized regions have comoving sizes of the order of a few Mpc, the large scale statistical properties of the HI distribution are dominated by the Poisson noise of the discrete ionized regions, and it is highly non-Gaussian. We investigate the possibility of probing reionization by studying these non-Gaussian features using future radio interferometric observations of redshifted 21 cm HI radiation. We develop a formalism relating correlatio…
Detecting redshifted 21cm emission from neutral hydrogen in the early Universe promises to give direct constraints on the epoch of reionization (EoR). It will, though, be very challenging to extract the cosmological signal (CS) from foregrounds and noise which are orders of magnitude larger. Fortunately, the signal has some characteristics which differentiate it from the foregrounds and noise, and we suggest that using the correct statistics may tease out signatures of reionization. We generate mock datacubes simulating the output of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) EoR experiment. These cubes …
Fluctuations in the redshifted 21 centimeter emission from neutral hydrogen probe the epoch of reionization. We examine the observability of this signal and the impact of extragalactic foreground radio sources. We use cosmological simulations to predict the angular correlation functions of intensity fluctuations due to unresolved radio galaxies, cluster radio halos and relics and free-free emission from the interstellar and intergalactic medium at the frequencies and angular scales relevant for the proposed 21cm tomography. In accord with previous findings, the brightness temperature fluctuati…
Brightness-temperature fluctuations in the redshifted 21-cm background from the cosmic dark ages are generated by irregularities in the gas-density distribution and can then be used to determine the statistical properties of density fluctuations in the early Universe. We first derive the most general expansion of brightness-temperature fluctuations up to second order in terms of all the possible sources of spatial fluctuations. We then focus on the three-point statistics and compute the angular bispectrum of brightness-temperature fluctuations generated prior to the epoch of hydrogen reionizat…
We investigate the all-sky signal in redshifted atomic hydrogen (HI) line from the reionization epoch. HI can be observed in both emission and absorption depending on the ratio of Lyman-$α$ to ionizing flux and the spectrum of the radiation in soft xray. We also compute the signal from pre-reionization epoch and show that within the uncertainty in cosmological parameters, it is fairly robust. The main features of HI signal can be summarized as: (a) The pre-ionized HI can be seen in absorption for $ν\simeq 10\hbox{--}40 \rm MHz$; the maximum signal strength is $\simeq 70\hbox{--}100 \rm mK$. (b…
The cosmic microwave background provides an image of the Universe 0.4 million years after the big bang, when atomic hydrogen formed out of free electrons and protons. One of the primary goals of observational cosmology is to obtain follow-up images of the Universe during the epoch of reionization, hundreds of millions of years later, when cosmic hydrogen was ionized once again by the UV photons emitted from the first galaxies. To achieve this goal, new observatories are being constructed, including low-frequency radio arrays capable of mapping cosmic hydrogen through its redshifted 21cm emissi…
Absorption or emission against the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) may be observed in the redshifted 21cm line if the spin temperature of the neutral intergalactic medium prior to reionization differs from the CMB temperature. This so-called 21cm tomography should reveal important information on the physical state of the intergalactic medium at high redshifts. The fluctuations in the redshifted 21 cm, due to gas density inhomogeneities at early times, should be observed at meter wavelengths by the next generation radio telescopes such as the proposed {\it Square Kilometer Array (SK…
Observations of redshifted 21cm radiation from HI at high redshifts is an important future probe of reionization. We consider the Multi-frequency Angular Power Spectrum (MAPS) to quantify the statistics of the HI signal as a joint function of the angular multipole l and frequency separation Δν. The signal at two different frequencies is expected to get decorrelated as Δνis increased, and quantifying this decorrelation is particularly important in deciding the frequency resolution for future HI observations. This is also expected to play a very crucial role in extracting the signal from foregro…
During the transition from a neutral to a fully reionized universe, scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons via free-electrons leads to a new anisotropy contribution to the temperature distribution. If the reionization process is inhomogeneous and patchy, the era of reionization is also visible via brightness temperature fluctuations in the redshifted 21 cm line emission from neutral Hydrogen. Since regions containing electrons and neutral Hydrogen are expected to trace the same underlying density field, the two are (anti) correlated and this is expected to be reflected in the …
